A fossil expert has established for the first time that parrots lived in Scandinavia about 55 million years ago when the area was covered in tropical forest.

The dead parrot sketch

Dr David Waterhouse of Norwich, Norfolk, found that a fossilised wing recovered from a mine in Denmark came from a bird which belonged to the parrot family.

He said: “I specialise in bird fossils and am also a Python fan, so I have lived with jokes about dead parrots for years.

“Obviously we were dealing with a bird that is bereft of life, but the tricky bit was establishing it was a parrot.”

Dr Waterhouse, the assistant curator of Natural History at Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, believes the same species of parrot would have also flown in Norway, as the country would have had a similar climate to Denmark at the time.

It is the first time that it has been established that parrots lived so far north, although at 55 million years old the bird is very much an 'ex-parrot’, having lived 10 million years after the dinosaurs died out.

The fossil is also much older than the remains of the next-oldest parrot found in the southern hemisphere, which are believed to date back 15 million years.

Dr Waterhouse, 29, has nicknamed the bird Danish Blue, although the species has now been given the scientific name Mopsitta Tanta.

“No Southern Hemisphere fossil parrot has been found older than about 15 million years old, so this new evidence suggests that parrots evolved right here in the Northern Hemisphere before diversifying further south in the tropics later on.” Dr Waterhouse said.

The classic dead parrot television sketch was first screened in 1969 on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

It featured John Cleese as angry parrot owner Eric Praline trying to convince a pet shop owner, played by Michael Palin, that the bird he had bought earlier was dead.

Cleese’s character is shown banging the lifeless bird on the counter, shouting at it, and pointing out it was nailed to the perch. He is assured by Palin that the lifeless Norwegian Blue is just resting, stunned, “tired following a prolonged squawk” or “pining for the fjords”.

It was voted Britain’s best loved alternative comedy sketch in a 2004 poll for the Radio Times.

Dr Waterhouse made his discovery three years ago in Denmark when he spotted the remains in a small museum on the Isle of Mors in Jutland. They were unearthed in 2003 at an opencast mine digging out soft rock for cat litter.

Dr Waterhouse, who was studying for a PhD in parrot evolution, was able to establish that the fossilised 6cm long humerus, or upper wing, had all the hallmarks of the parrot family.

His research, supported by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology and University College Dublin is published in the current issue of Palaeontology journal.

Michael Palin was amused when told about the discovery, saying: “All I can say is that it just shows that nothing is original.”